


where the heart moves the stones

by nyklen



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Deus Ex Machina, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Sort-of, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 11:25:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11379228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyklen/pseuds/nyklen
Summary: Variations on a theme: where Diana's quite sure she has exhaustively covered all possibilities wherein he returns to her, except the one which she doesn't consider but which comes true instead.





	where the heart moves the stones

**Author's Note:**

> I was writing another fic but my mind was fixated on a fix-it and well, this happened. Somehow it became an 11k-word monster. Plays fast and loose with DC canon (including DCEU and New 52 and a nugget from Hush) and Greek mythology and probably parts of history. Title from Mystic's Dream by Loreena McKennitt. Hope you enjoy.

 

 

**i.**

It is a truth universally acknowledged that airplanes in the early days of aviation are little more than flying death traps. Feat of German engineering regardless, Steve knows the bomber he is currently flying firmly belongs in the same category, and when one considers the racks and rows of hydrogen-based mustard gas bombs rattling merrily in their shelves, well…

Most pilots would be running in the other direction. He has volunteered to die with it.

He casts a wild eye behind him, beyond where the pilot lies unconscious to the bombs waiting patiently to be deployed, and tells himself his sacrifice will be for the greater good. _Heroism in utilitarianism_ , he thinks that’d make a good catchphrase for the war.

Apparently life has other ideas for him, as his eye catches on the true piece of German engineering: a soft pack of canvas and silk and rope. He thinks of Diana and the growing possibility of there being an _after_ the war for him and hesitates for but a second before untangling the static line and strapping the pack on.

He murmurs a prayer _please let me live_ to whatever gods might be listening (and includes Zeus for good measure because hey, if Diana is battling the _actual_ Greek god of war down there, then that means at least there’s one god he knows who is real and who will actually hear his plea and he really needs all the luck he can get right now), grips the handle of the cockpit door as he aims carefully behind him and squeezes the trigger.

The force of the decompression almost rips his shoulder out, even as he grits his teeth and jumps, plummeting through the air before the static line deploys the parachute canopy and the shock blast of a bomber packed with enough lethal power to decimate London hits him simultaneously and he hurtles sideways through the air at an alarming rate.

Silk is one of the world’s strongest natural fibres, and close to steel on tensile strength, but Steve learns the painful way that silk is no match for red hot steel which slices through the fabric like butter and _shit_ he’s losing altitude much faster than he’s comfortable with. There are three flapping tears in his chute ergo only so much his descent can be controlled, so he aims for the nearest batch of leafy trees in hopes for cushioning his fall and for some reason he’s thinking of Icarus and wings and flying too close to the sun.

He hits the cluster of pine trees hard enough to knock what air is left out of his lungs, and then he’s crashing through branches in showers of needles and tangles of rope before everything goes black.

 

When he wakes up, his body is bruised and sore and there’s a bump on his head that does not stop screaming (metaphorically and physically _into his brain_ ). He tries to move but his limbs are tangled and tied down in parachute rope but the ground underneath him is soft and he never really knew pine needles smelt sharp like antiseptic and _hang on_ this looks nothing like a forest what he thought were ropes are actually shackles to a bed.

When he calms down there’s a voice speaking to him in English-accented German, gruff and curt and broken, demanding his name, his rank, his purpose. Relief breaks through him in a rush – he’s in an Entente camp. This? This is something he can talk his way out of.

That is, if his vocal cords would actually start _cooperating_. As it happens, he ends up expending more effort than he expects to grit out, in his most stereotypical American accent, “Captain Steve Trevor, American Expeditionary Forces. Serial number 814192.”

His identification causes a minor chaos and he repeats his serial number a couple more times before the faces above him flit away and English Voice says, “wait here.” He weakly shakes his arm and the shackle sounds against the bed-rail. As if he has anywhere else he _can_ be.

In the camp, in the bed, he loses track of time: he learns the armistice has been signed (“eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, son. You’re lucky we found you after that or…”) and the war to end all wars is over and his first thought is _she did it they did it we did it_ as his heart flip-flops in his chest, followed by a bone-deep exhaustion seeping out of his bones because _it is over lay down your burdens_. As hours pass, he wonders if he will ever see Sammy or Charlie or Chief or Etta or _her_ again, if they are even alive; each query on his release only nets him a “I don’t know” response which only frustrates him further.

Then one day he is well enough to sit upright and his cuff clinks merrily as he pulls himself up, arms shaking, panting slightly from the effort while the room stops spinning around him. A doctor rushes over to him, and through his galloping heart and blood rising in his ears he hears soothing words like _easy there_ and _the credential check is taking a while HQ is too caught up with the jubilant mood in Blighty to reply telegrams_ and _if you ask me, you don’t look like a German officer._

Five days in and they are comfortable enough with his presence that he’s trading jokes with the camp soldiers (who remain blissfully ignorant, either by design or choice, of his credential status) and reminiscing about _going home_ , nine days and they feel secure enough to uncuff him as he stretches his legs and hobbles across the floor.

Sixteen days and the arrow on the wheel of bureaucracy finally turns to them. He’s in the mess tent having lunch when Private Wilkinson runs in waving a telegram. _Yes stop,_ it says, _Trevor friendly stop Darnell vouches stop Commence release procedures stop Return alive stop._

 

He arrives back in London on a cold winter night, and has never found it so welcoming as then, with the clogged Thames a lazily flowing grey line and smog in his eyes and city stench in the air. _Home sweet home_.

He needs to find _them_ , to know they all survived the airfield, but he doesn’t know where to start and so he wanders, until it starts snowing which reminds him of a voice in a tiny village in Belgium exclaiming in childlike wonder _it’s magical_ and swaying with her under the starry skies and _hope_.

Then he looks up and he’s in Trafalgar Square and the chill he feels has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the wall in front of him.

Because he’s on it.

A faded Steve Trevor with smiling eyes stars back at him, beret at a rakish angle. (He remembers the day the photo was taken, when he got his wings and Ma wanted a photo so he obliged against his assigned plane and grinned so broadly ear to ear he felt his face might split from joy.)

He unpins the photo from the wall and hastily stuffs it into his coat pocket, feeling a complicated joy because now he knows they survived but they think he is gone.

Dawn finds him at Etta’s. It takes five knocks before he hears footsteps shuffling and a muttered, “hold your horses” and the door opens on his (current? former?) secretary’s face which goes from cheery (she has always been a morning person) to shocked and on its way to matching the colour of the snow. So caught up in thoughts of _oh gods I might have rendered Etta catatonic_ he doesn’t see the hand that snakes out and pinches his forearm, hard.

“Ow,” as he jumps, rubbing absently at the attacked spot.

“You are _real_ ,” Etta crows, face widening into a grin. Then before he knows it he is attacked by fists “you” hit “gave” hit hit “us” a smack on the shoulder “such” hit “a” two fists on his chest “scare!”

He shrugs and opens his mouth to explains, but then he hears her voice, husky with sleep, coming closer in a doppler shift, “Etta, is everything okay? You have been there for a- _Steve_.”

“Hey,” he manages to say before an armful of Amazon near knocks him off-balance (and which, in Steve Trevor's rulebook, is a much more preferable method to “tree branches” and “impact of colliding against something hard like the ground” when it comes to “getting the wind knocked out of one’s lungs”).

 

 

 

**ii.**

In America, land of immigrants, she finds her family still alive.

The first decade after _his_ death she had intentions (truly) to make a pilgrimage to his homeland, he had described it to her _come back with me to America_ – vastness in wheat-yellow and grass green and endless blue sky _fairs in the summer and all the ice-cream in all the flavours you can eat_ – as they lay tangled in warm sheets in a tiny room in Veld in a world she has only seen in shades of smoke grey and mud brown and violently punctuated by the occasional vivid red of spilled blood.

But some part of her is afraid the journey will only serve to highlight his death, and so she procrastinates.

Then the last moral war ravages and Korea happens and Vietnam and Cuba and the Cold War escalates (and if she is honest with herself, there are excuses here, buried under layers of fighting and justice and bloodshed and nightmarish memories of a plane going up in flames).

 

She lands herself on America’s shores in the heady booming ‘90s and one fine spring day quite accidentally stumbles into Persephone (rather, Diana is sure that her stumbling is accidental, her step-sister’s appearance is entirely calculated).

“You are dead,” she says dumbly, when she manages to recover her balance, but clearly not her wits.

The impossibly beautiful redhead clucks her tongue softly, almost pityingly, and for a moment Diana feels like a child again, withering under the disappointed stare of her tutor because she forgot how Pericles perished ( _no Diana he wasn’t assassinated, it was the plague_ ).

“Gods don’t die, not really.” An arm loops companionably around hers, and to any curious passers-by they simply look like best friends out for a stroll, albeit one that leaves freshly-bloomed vegetation in its wake. “ _We_ were brought here centuries ago, crossing the Atlantic as whispers and hope and fragmented remnants of memory – a divine nation of foreigners held captive by the earthly nation of migrant humans in all shapes and sizes and combinations. It is to this land we are chained and in this land we _exist_ , diminished and fading and prone to winking in and out of time,” a shoulder lifts in a half-resigned shrug, “it’s not much of _live_ , per se, but it is survival.”

“Survival,” apparently she has some parrot DNA too, in addition to being a demi-goddess.

Wisely, Persephone ignores her best imitation of an echo chamber. A hand sweeps across in an elegant arc, neatly encompassing the busy city and the surrounding mountains with gigantic block white letters on their side, “They call this place The Dreams Factory. Here, humans _dream_ , Diana. They imagine and they believe and tell our stories and use our names; they read about Perseus and about Heracles and his twelve labours and they believe in Zeus, in Hera, in _us_ ; they retell the sack of Troy ad nauseam and with each iteration it is one more tribute and scores more humans who believe in our existence. It’s not as pure as true worship, but we adapt and we carry on.”

As if sensing a question, “our dear beloved bloodthirsty brother isn’t dead either, Diana, although he is in my husband’s domain. He probably wishes he were, since Sisyphus is extremely overjoyed at having a companion to moan about his impossible task at for the next eternity...”

Persephone trails off and looks at her, and face-to-face Diana thinks she can see their resemblance, thinks she can tell which features she inherited from her godly deadbeat of a father, thinks in other circumstances they might even be amicable acquaintances.

“We know why you are here, Diana,” she suddenly says, all previous lightness in her voice startlingly absent, “but do not tarry, America is a bad place for gods – a bad place to live and a good place to die.” A soft sigh, “and maybe it’s true for demi-gods too.”

Diana hears the warning but not the threat: callous and capricious the Dodekatheon may be, she figures they are not self-serving enough to destroy her, their weapon, their god-killer. (She wants to say _family_ but considering their historical track record with demi-offspring, she doesn’t believe familial ties have as much sway.)

Then Persephone smiles, light returning into her voice and Diana a) almost gets mental whiplash and b) swears she sees rainclouds _clear_ on the distant horizon.

Next thing she knows she’s holding a fresh bouquet of flowers (lilies) in her hands and Persephone is still chattering on, “…managed to convince Clotho to mend the thread and Lachesis to change her measurements. Sapped us of quite a bit of power too, but nothing a few whispers in the right ears and a couple more tentpoles wouldn’t fix; we really should get Hermes on it. But I digress,” a deep breath, “the _point_ is that it’s just a small token of gratitude from all of us. You are, after all, our greatest pride, Diana,” and in it she hears another female voice from decades back _you are my greatest sorrow_.

Then they turn a corner and Persephone releases her arm with a cheery “Thanatos sends his regards” and vanishes in bloom of petals even as the words linger in the air, leaving behind a very confused Amazon princess.

Naturally, she gets so caught up in thoughts of her divine relatives and whatever Persephone was on about and looking at the bouquet of lilies she holds that she accidentally crosses the road on a red man in busy L.A. in a funk.

Next thing she knows a weight is barrelling into her and she slams backwards into the sidewalk, hard enough for impact lines to radiate out from the concrete. When she finally catches her breath, and looks up to thank her rescuer (she is pretty sure the car would have been the more damaged party, but she’s trying to keep a low profile here), she finds herself staring into eyes the blue of Themysciran seas and what she is certain has got to be the biggest display of _deus ex machina_ by any Hellenic deity for a few centuries.

“Steve…?”

Kneeled over her, he grins self-consciously, endearingly; a lock of blond hair flops over into his eyes and he absently brushes it away – a gesture so reminiscent of their last parting that her heart clenches, “hey.”

 

 

 

**iii.**

Bruce Wayne is not the world’s greatest detective without reason, nor is he one to assemble a league of metahumans without concurrently collecting any available scrap of information he can on each and every one of them – he knows Victor’s elementary school discipline record (“poor, has room for improvement”) and the amount of green kryptonite it takes to make Clark drop to his knees (six mols) and how many espressos it takes for Barry to vibrate through the floor (three normal ones, or two if they are extra-strong; none if Barry realises and switches the entire machine to decaf) and the precise method to incapacitate Arthur (Scarecrow’s fear toxin, two doses in gaseous form or one if direct skin contact, to render him aquaphobic for enough hours).

What he cannot find however, is Diana’s birthday. Admittedly, a rather insurmountable task since he finds one account indicating she is made out of clay (unlike the pottery she acquires for the Louvre, he reckons she doesn’t have a date stamped on _her_ ) but he also _knows_ she is a demi-goddess (although, considering how her half-sister sprung fully formed from their father’s forehead, he does not find any reason for the two to be mutually-exclusive notions).

He goes for the next reasonable alternative, and acquires a yellowed paper dated slightly after WW1 with a half dozen British Government stamps on it and “Diana Prince” printed in block letters at the top. It states her birthdate as 2 November 1895 and he figures it’s better than nothing.

(If he’d asked her, she’d have told him it was a birthdate as real as any – the day _Diana Prince_ came into existence, born in a moment of well-intentioned subterfuge on the marble hallways of the War Office.)

Somehow Barry comes across this information and Diana’s email and _that_ photo in Veld in the database and in the course of a few short hours a) finds that one of the men is Captain Steve Trevor who i) was an American pilot turned British spy who ii) died honourably in battle iii) a day before the Armistice was declared ergo iv) most likely to be the guy who makes Diana look so sad sometimes, b) plans a rescue effort to rewrite a portion of history, and c) manages to get the rest of them involved in his insane plan.

Crazily enough, the plan works, in the sense that eight tries and quite some singes later, Barry appears in a crackle of lightning smelling of ozone and mustard holding a man in a thick wool coat and a German uniform, who looks around bewildered at his change in scenery.

Unsurprisingly it almost backfires since said bewildered man instinctively raises his right hand in self-defence and the resulting bullet neatly shears off a bat-ear.

Then it is stowing the good captain away and keeping the whole thing a secret from Diana which is actually harder than it sounds, when Barry is quite literally bouncing off the walls and Victor is practicing Mendelssohn’s Wedding March on his harmonica and Arthur is _smiling,_ while Bruce begins to seriously consider a two-week stay at Arkham Asylum might be preferable to the circus at the Watchtower.

The shock on Diana’s face when she walks into the Hall and sees him makes everything worth it (although the Amazon freezes still long enough that Barry second-guesses himself and wonders if he brought back the right “him” and calculates the odds of him rewriting another set of history in the next five seconds), and so does “ _Steve_ ”, whispered in disbelief, and the affirmation of “ _ohmygod Diana_ ”, dropping hoarse from Steve Trevor’s lips.

She manages only eight words _thank you for bringing him back to me_ to them as her full attention is focused on her long-lost captain.

They all find alternative lodging away from the Watchtower for the rest of the week, and Victor programmes the cleaning robots to use industrial strength cleaner in their weekly maintenance routine.

 

\--------------------

 

 

**0.**

This is how it happens instead:

 

Steven Rockwell Trevor, born 1985, near the rolling foothills of Asheville, North Carolina, and named, lock, stock and barrel, for his great granduncle, the Great War hero that never came home.

He grows up on tales of his namesake, bedtime stories of adventure and spy intrigue read from aged leather journals. When he starts getting night terrors filled with fire and lightning and burning that make him wake up screaming and sobbing, the parental executive decision is made to _he’s only a child, maybe one day, when he’s older… put them away for now._ If his descriptions seem too real, too vivid, they are chalked off as a somewhat-understandable by-product of a six year old’s overactive imagination.

At ten, playing hide and seek with his cousins and the neighbour’s boy, he finds a large, battered, dusty trunk in the attic, where the hinges creak when he pushes it open and makes the air musty. Nestled in one side against piles of clothes is an equally old, but smaller, cardboard box, half-covered in stamps showing a man’s profile in varying colours. He finds the material for his bedtime stories packed neatly there, spines up on a sharply-folded, well-preserved American flag, and in black velvet boxes against faded ribbons, a Purple Heart and a Victoria Cross, their once-bright bronze sheens dulled with age.

Tucked into a corner of the box, folded by time and seams of its position, he finds a square of paper, all fancy stationery (he can tell, because it’s thick like those Christmas cards Ma sends out every year) and old vanilla-scented and age spots at the borders. The handwriting on it is thin and fine and long:

 

_Dear Mrs Trevor,_

_These are your son’s effects that came into my possession. I have kept them for many times longer than the days I actually knew him, and they have given me great comfort in the last decade. I hope they bring you and your family closure. Steve Trevor was a good man and a great hero who saved millions of lives, ended the war, and taught me to believe in mankind._

_I wish I could have passed this to you in person – your son was very dear to me, but some part of me feels that if I meet you it means I know of one more person out there who misses him, and I finally have to acknowledge that he has left the world. This allows me to deny that for a little while longer._

_Perhaps someday I will have the courage yet to thank you for giving me, for giving the world, him._

_With all my love,_

_– D.P._

 

The next day at breakfast, he claims the trunk as his, both a conferred birth-right and an inheritance, if only by virtue of his name. He demands, with all the precociousness of a child, to be called, “Steve, like my great granduncle” thereafter.

\-------------

 

At twenty-six, Steve Trevor has his wings and is as cocky a flyboy as the next guy standing at attention in line at the graduation ceremony. A war has broken out and his call-up weighs a stone on his table. He bids Ma and Pa goodbye and strides to the cargo plane, determination in his eyes and his namesake’s purple heart a good luck charm in his pocket and a fierce desire to do his family proud in his heart.

(He does not turn back, and so he misses the moment where the smiles on his parents’ faces fade into worry lines and frightened tears.)

War, he learns, is destruction – messy and chaotic and bureaucratic. It is receiving orders from disembodied voices laden with the static of satellite phones and long strafing runs where he doubts himself and questions his orders and his targets and wonders how many civilians he has unwittingly killed on basis of “we have intel”. The first time the thought materialises in his head he hears a phantom voice of a woman, _you fight without honour,_ an echo in sync with the rhythmic rat-tat-tat of the F-16’s guns with every pull of the trigger. In the silence and loneliness of the cockpit his ghost incessantly accuses, _how do you know who you kill if you can’t see their faces,_ and he wishes to all higher deities he has an answer for this, for the madness he has signed up into.

When he dreams they are nightmarish sequences of aerial battles and fiery bombing runs in cities he does not know the names of _this is Zipper to Longshot, target in sight, ready for drop on your command_ and hell-scapes of agonised screams in muddy trenches that he wakes up drenched in sweat with the spectral sensation of flames crawling over his skin and his ears ringing. He wonders if Great Granduncle had it figured out.

(He thinks he has it rationalised: a part of him still _believes_ they are doing the right thing, believes in the justness of a pre-emptive war to stop the killing of thousands more.

It is that part that keeps the rest of him sane.)

 

\-------------

 

Two weeks to the end of his tour and disaster hits in form of a roadside bombing of the convoy he is escorting on the ground. For far too many seconds his world is reduced to a line of searing heat and excruciating pain as shrapnel tears up his right leg and he briefly subscribes to the concept of karma.

He wakes up in a military hospital in Kuwait days later with parched throat and a heavily bandaged leg (“you’re lucky we managed to save it”) and then it is months of physical rehabilitation (and frustration) and walking with a cane. He is transferred back to the States, and limps down onto home soil for the first time in years to an armful of crying Ma who nearly knocks him off-balance.

 

\-------------

 

Steven Rockwell Trevor, named for his great-granduncle, goes from fresh-faced flyboy extraordinaire to prickly wounded veteran to disillusioned drone operator (“unmanned aerial vehicle pilot”, in official-talk, as if that would make what was very essentially a desk job with some tricked-out firepower any better) with his very own Predator. Cooped in a cubicle surrounded by monitors, he grips the control stick and tries not to miss the blue of the skies and the flare of the sun as it hits his cockpit’s glass.

Still, he thinks it’s a gig he can get used to: it’s more surveillance and intelligence gathering than angel-of-death-ing, the work hours are better and the pay’s not too shabby either, his belongings are not constantly covered in a layer of dust and sand, he gets to Facetime Ma and Pa on the regular without fear of the connection getting cut, and his security clearance is still high enough that the powers that be overlook his slight limp (or maybe, because of it) and he gets to be the test pilot on whatever new contraption Wayne Enterprises comes up with.

But what doesn’t change from the smoke-tinged acrid air of the Gulf, albeit at a lower frequency, is this: the disembodied, staticky voices, the finality embedded in the pronouncement of “our intel states that”, and the phantom whispers as if on loop _you fight without honour you fight without honour you fight without honour_ that he thinks he’s getting PTSD even though he has been cleared by the in-base doctor and psychiatrist the previous five times.

 

\-------------

 

It takes eleven months before he hands in his request for a discharge (honourable, he hopes) because he cannot fathom doing _this_ anymore: he doesn’t _believe_ anymore, can’t be certain if his actions amount to any good as war rages on, and reckons he has innocent civilian blood on his hands and _what was it all for?_

 

\-------------

 

A week after, he loses his Predator to a well-timed SAM, and his monitor, previously a live feed from his drone’s cam, becomes a vision of licking flames and rolling heat and bursts of light. For a moment he is dislocated in time, held down by his jet harness, the warm weight of a gun in his hand, the itchy scratch of a wool coat against his neck, a calm certainty settling down in his bones as the world lights up around him: _I have to go._

He returns to the present, gasping heavily, to the handful of worried faces and voices that swarm him. By the day’s end, he has written an incident report on the UAV’s downing, and been ordered by his commander to take out his leave days and “get your head back on straight, son”.

He takes the next flight back to North Carolina, and then it is a short drive to the nearest civilian airfield.

In the air, with the low drone of the motor and ground stretching out before him in an endless sea of green and wheat-yellow and blue, he begins to think everything will be back to normal.

That is, until the storm rolls in fast and hard and gives him barely any time to land. On hindsight he figures, as he abandons the plane to rush to the closest shelter, he would have been safer if he stayed up in the air, waiting out the lightning storm. Out here, on flat land, he becomes a sitting duck. _Stupid stupid stu-_

Then static freezes up the air around him and makes his hair stand on end. His brain manages a brief _oh shit_ before something hard hits him in the back of his head and his body crumples to the ground.

 

For the second time in three days he comes to surrounded by worried faces. Except, as he blinks furiously, the faces, plural, are now a face, singular. _Angel_ , his mind helpfully supplies the word, as he feels a cool hand on his cheek and a woman looks down on him _you are a man_ with such concern and worry in the furrow of her brows he wants to pretend to be unconscious a little while longer. But there is the pesky discomfort of the sun in his eyes and the water-logged wool of his stolen German uniform and a beach in each of his boots and he needs to get the notebook back to England and _wait what?_

He blinks again and four faces sharpen into view; the sky above him is a threatening grey with a rainbow on the side and there is wet grass and cold earth under his back and his angel is nowhere to be found. His head throbs fiercely like he was struck with a massive cosmic punch (which, he thinks, sounds like a pretty apt description of a lightning strike at any rate) and his chest aches from something else he is as-yet unable to quantify.

At the hospital, he becomes a celebrity of sorts: his temporary tag being Steve Trevor, lightning strike survivor. He lies in bed hooked up to machines measuring goodness-knows-what as his hand gets shaken enough times to potentially be a martini worthy of Bond. To hear the nurses talk about it feels surreal, but that feeling quickly stops when the doctor lifts his shirt and there is a scorch mark on his chest, right where his heart is. They find the entry point slightly above the base of his skull, and next thing he knows “miracle” is appended to his tag by wide-eyed, open-mouthed, head-shaking doctors telling him _you should be dead the survival rate for this type of strike is less than 1%_. They look at him as an anomaly, an inquisition, a herald of some apocalypse, and he wants to say _yeah buddy, I know what it’s like to have your world all shaken up too_.

 

He convalesces at home, on doctor’s orders and to soothe the fears of Ma, if nothing else. She hovers protectively over him but _he feels fine he is fine. fine fine fine_ if he had a dollar for every time he utters the word he’d be halfway to getting that Ducati he’s been eyeing.

By Night 2 his past starts returning, slowly but surely, so identical to his night terrors when he was six, but time, tide and lightning have jiggled something loose in his head, and so he experiences it all in their full technicolour, Dolby-surround sound, 3D petting zoo glory.

(He finds there is a certain kind of discomfort, a sort of cognitive dissonance, when you have two distinct lives in your head, the same soul in a slightly different body, and are named for who you were. He’s a chicken and egg riddle wrapped in an identity crisis, a predestination paradox waiting to happen. Also, the small fact that he is technically _more than a hundred years old._

Then there’s the sobering part where Steve Trevor the second is older than Steve Trevor prime ever got to be, is Major to his Captain – he is a war veteran twice over with double the emotional scars as souvenirs.)

Day 5 and he lugs his battered trunk to his room and carefully unpacks the journals. His hand smooths over their leather covers and he remembers writing in them – the scratch of the fountain pen over coarse paper, his hands stained with ink, that blotch where Sammy had started talking to him and his pen had accidentally, distractedly rested on the paper a second too long.

Day 7 and hours of Googling later he fancies himself an amateur in reincarnation and its related philosophies. Everything is well and good and sound and would probably describe his situation _in theory_ until he stumbles onto the concept of _metempsychosis_ and a couple hours of Plato’s _Republic_ on Sparknotes later he is dead sure that lightning strike not so much a fluke of nature and probably everything to do with a certain Greek god.

Day 8 and he suddenly remembers the note an inquisitive 10 year old Steve found one summer’s day playing hide and seek. He nearly tears through the box before finding it half-hidden in a fold of the flag and he smiles for the first time in days.

_Diana._

He traces the loops of her letters, elegant and stately _just like her_ and wonders how he got to a hundred years before he knew how her words looked like.

One. Hundred. Years.

_Fuck._

It hits him and it is nothing like the jolt of a lightning strike nor the force of a thousand gas bombs igniting below him and more like a slow-spreading existential ache that starts from his fingertips through his limbs and pouring through his veins before reaching his thudding heart. It pulls at his mind and he does not want to be Steve Trevor, born 1890, anymore because they are gone _Etta and Sammy and Charlie and Chief are gone._

 _Diana is gone._ He is the last of them to survive. _Fuck._

Day 10 and he is shaken out of his self-induced self-pity spiral by a phone call: his request for discharge has been denied and his transfer (what?) is effective (huh?) and a car will be swinging by in two hours to pick him up and please pack something light to last a week thereabouts Major.

 

\-------------

 

Amanda Waller’s reputation precedes her, and she knows it – he is apprehensive and nervous the moment he steps into the room, like a schoolboy being sent to meet the headmistress, and he is (was? He is not so sure with tenses now) a _goddamn spy._ He is pretty sure he wasn’t shaking like a leaf when he stole Maru’s notebook either.

Waller slides a standard beige classified folder across the table, “You ever heard of metahumans, Major?”

Which is how he ends up the official government liaison to the Justice League. And why he is in Gotham crime capital of North America. And wearing a nice suit for the first time in _years_ because hey, that’s what you do when you meet a group of superheroes that’s saving the world on the regular and want to make a good impression. Or so he reckons, since there isn’t exactly a particular precedent stated in the military handbook for such a situation.

(He tries reading the folder but there are no pictures _we take precautions to conceal their identities here Major, some of them have civilian personalities who are more vulnerable than the others, you will be meeting them eventually anyway so let’s just call it a… surprise besides they are not exactly a group of death row supervillains_ and scant information _this is all we have Major; the last liaison… let’s just say the information-gathering was a little stilted_ and he starts finding Wikipedia and Youtube more informative on the metahuman phenomenon, even though most videos have been removed for “content violations”, no doubt claimed by ARGUS.)

 

What he does not know is this:

Halfway across town in Bruce Wayne’s newly refurbished family mansion a frustrated Arthur Curry is currently considering making kebab of his teammates because _Barry please stop literally wearing a hole in the floor go out for a run if you need to_ and _Victor you look like you’re going to blow a well-soldered circuit please calm down_ and _no Bruce do not activate the anti-burglar system remember what happened to the last liaison please wear your civvies we need the government to trust us not run away screaming yes you can wear the cowl with that_ and _Poseidon help me I am babysitter to a league of kids_ and _where’s Diana?_

 

What he does know:

The ARGUS car drops him off at a stately old gothic-style Georgian mansion, all dark stone and sneering gargoyles with a profusion of columns (“Mr Wayne has graciously provided his home as a neutral location for this occasion”), and drives off the second he closes the car door, burning rubber. Steve tries not to ignore the dramatic potential in that as he makes his way up the steps.

The door opens on a butler in a suit more starched than his, and he internally marvels at the dark oak panelling and plasterwork and art so rare he’s pretty sure the Louvre could only dream of owning them. The butler opens another door, and ushers him through with a, “they are waiting for you, Major Trevor.”

A whirlwind almost crashes into him as he enters the main hall. “I’m back is everyone here?” it yells. The Flash then, he IDs to himself ( _human, mortal; superhuman speed and related abilities including time, interstellar, dimensional and quantum travel_ , Waller’s dossier had written).

“Nope.” Cyborg (the dossier: _human, originally mortal, currently unknown; exceptionally gifted with IQ estimated at 170, tech savant, skilled combat fighter, organic and bio-mechatronic body parts and related enhancements_ ). “We’re still waiting for D– for her.” Steve is pretty sure there is a whole world of subtext in the bionic stare he subsequently levels at the whirlwind.

He remembers reading about a _her_ : codenamed Wonder Woman. Immortal, suspected godly origins (there was a marking beside it, made in Waller’s cribbed handwriting, _demi-goddess???_ , it said), powers and abilities include: near-invulnerability, flight, super-strength, speaks all known (and some unknown) languages… He recall a dim cavern with glowing water and a woman dressed in golden leather with curiosity in her eyes _we speak hundreds of languages_ and then in a war room surrounded by white-haired bureaucrats in stiff ceremonial uniforms _Ottoman and Sumerian, surely someone else knew that_ and he wonders if Diana, if she were alive, or this mysterious her would win a linguistic battle _but can you recite Socrates in Ancient Greek._

“Called her,” Aquaman enters (the dossier had only five words on him, _Atlantean; can talk to fish_ ), waving his phone, followed by the Batman (even less helpful: _not an urban legend_ ). “Says she got caught up in an acquisition, some Greek pot dated back to proto-Corinthian something or other, very old and very boring – my words not hers. Says she’d be here soon.”

Caught up in his thoughts of Diana, Steve wants to interject, break the ice, joke that he met a very fascinating piece of pottery once, but his mind gets stuck on _decades ago_ and a fresh longing and pain rekindles in him because _she died_ and the only pottery left now is his heart shattered like so many pieces of clay.

A half hour passes wherein Steve is slightly creeped out by the half-smile on Batman’s face, realises that Aquaman drinks _a lot of water_ , watches Cyborg spin his harmonica until he almost sees stars, is engaged by the Flash in a conversation on something called the Speed Force which only leaves him more confused, and generally seats awkwardly on the couch trying to look serious and focused and not twiddle his thumbs like a stereotypical bored government stooge.

There’s a deafening sonic boom in the air that makes him jump in shock, before his military reflexes kick in and he drops to a crouch on the ground, gun in hand and senses at full-alert as his old leg wound screams a sharp pain as protest. His surprise then, to see four pairs of eyes looking at him like he grew a third head (rather rich, considering the company).

“Nothing to be worried about,” Batman murmurs, “she’s here.”

 

\-------------

 

Diana isn’t sure what she expects when Bruce tells them the new government liaison will be meeting them in a couple days (“how did they find a new one so quickly?”) but she certainly does not appreciate the change-up in her schedule considering there’s an exceedingly well-preserved black-figure miniature amphora circa 700 BC due for the New York Christie’s auction block that very day and hour; the Louvre has no pre-emption right on that, and so as the esteemed curator of the antiquities department it naturally falls to her to secure the item _at any cost_ (“I’ll try to be there Bruce, these auctions may take a while, _as you know_.”) _._

Then Arthur calls her just as the auctioneer thumps his hammer _sold to the lady in red in the second row!_ and she beats a hasty retreat to the reception area where he hurriedly informs her that the ARGUS rep _is here, Diana, young guy, nothing like the stooge they sent before, looks like one of those ex-military types, you know_ (she tries not to, considering the last “military type” she knew up close and very personally went and blew himself up to save the world and left her with a hurt so deep she still feels it a century and a dozen lovers later) _please wear civvies we all are, even Bruce._ Then _bring your lasso too, just in case._

A ream of paperwork, several signatures and a couple of business calls later, she breaks the sound barrier arriving at Wayne Manor.

Three millennia, a century spent living amongst mankind, a year or so of fighting alongside and against beings from this world and others, she has come to expect most things, or at least adapt quickly enough to line up with the expectation.

What she expects is a standard government-issued bureaucrat, black suit, white shirt, polished shoes, officious and arrogant, and in this case, pretty brave, if Bruce hasn’t scared him off yet.

What she does _not_ expect is to walk into Bruce Wayne’s hall and find a sharply-dressed ghost staring gobsmacked at her (she is pretty sure her expression mirrors his).

(After a century of imagining scenarios wherein he returns to her during which she’s pretty sure she has exhaustively covered all known possibilities, she apparently never considered this.)

“No.”

She blinks, but he is still there. Distantly, as if in a dream, she hears Barry’s voice, mimicking an announcer, “presenting Major Steve Tr–,” and then lasso is a hot streak in her hand and his voice…

_His voice._

Strained but earnest and hopeful and just as she remembers it, as her lasso tightens around him in a golden glow, creasing his neatly-pressed jacket, “Diana, it’s me, I swear.” A grunt, and a half-exasperated huff, blue eyes bright, “Captain Steve Trevor. Pilot, American Expeditionary Forces. Serial number 814192,” and she hears it like an easy echo to one spoken through gritted teeth in a throne room on an island that technically doesn’t exist. A nervous hand runs through blonde hair as he continues on, words tumbling out in a rush, “well technically, Major, took me only a century to get promoted, and I’m thinking my term of service to British Intelligence has since lapsed and ARGUS came a-calling after my Predator got blown up and I guess I’m now your new government liaison and _I missed you so much Diana_.”

To hear Barry describe the next sequence of events:

Diana’s face crumples in tears and she drops to her knees where she stands, lasso falling slack to the ground as “Steve” issues from her lips in a broken hitch.

It takes all of five seconds for Major Trevor to untangle himself from the lasso and run over to her, almost tripping on the rope as he does before he skids to a stop before her, “Diana” murmured so reverently as if he thinks she is mist and shadow set to disappear with the next breeze.

In order, she brings hesitant fingers to his face, his hair, his shoulders, crushes him in a hug, hands running across the broadness of his back, whispers, “you came back” into the hollow of his neck , and presses a light kiss to his throat where his pulse hammers a wild staccato. He, in turn, finally remembers the use of his limbs, as his arms tighten around her frame and tangle in her hair and his lips are on her temple, her nose, her lips, as they cling to each other and shudder years and history and nightmares of fire and lightning away.

(To be entirely fair, Barry is not too far off from what actually happens, albeit with a few embellishments.)

When they separate Victor and Arthur have retreated from the room, Barry is still staring, and Bruce has the strangest self-satisfied smirk on his face (Diana makes a note to ask him about it later, although with very recent events her priority list has been reworked with the first hundred items related to Steve so that sits in mid three figures somewhere between “deal with overdue acquisition paperwork” and “get around to writing a speech for the antiquities conference next month”.)

“I thought you were dead,” she manages, when she regains use of her vocal cords.

The living, breathing, _real_ man in front of her laughs, and it suddenly occurs to her she hasn’t seen him in colour in a hundred years, or heard his laugh in the same amount of time – it makes her want to freeze and savour the moment, until he goes, “I thought you were dead too,” with all the feeling of a coma patient waking up to realise his world has moved on.

An interlude, where she chases his tears with her lips and his fingers reacquaint themselves with the planes of her face.

 

\-------------

 

He manages to focus enough on his job to message Waller an update, _off to a good start_ , which if she thinks is too short, hey, tit-for-tat, considering the skimpy folder he received as an introduction to the League. But he figures it’s enough to ensure that he is still employed and she doesn’t need to activate special forces to shell the hell out of the Manor.

 

\-------------

 

It occurs to him belatedly, foggily – sometime after Batman interrupts, after an awkward team dinner, after Alfred shows them to a room in the East Wing, and after that part where his jacket and her top are on the floor and she’s on his lap and they’re making up for a century of missed kisses and lost passion – that he doesn’t even know _exactly_ where they stand. (It wasn’t as if they had a chance to discuss that back in 1918 either, in between them infiltrating a gala and her saving the world and him getting blown up and all that nitty-gritty detail.)

He shifts away from her, and his resolve almost falters as she gazes on him with kiss-swollen lips and eyes darkened with desire and hair tousled around her shoulders; he thinks of sailors and sirens and how he will gladly be lured to shipwreck upon her shores.

“Um.” _Good start, Trevor_. “We, um, this… what are we, Diana?”

Her brow creases and he continues in a rush, “I mean, I’m not married and there’s no one I’m seeing now but it’s been a hundred years and as much as I want to spend forever with you I will get it if you have moved on and have someone else in your life I’m not here to mess your life up-”

“Steve.” He has forgotten how his name rolls off her tongue. “I have not been in the institution of marriage. So,” she breaks off, reaches down where his hand holds her hip, takes it and laces their fingers and they are both momentarily transported to a smoggy, smelly, wartime London, a lifetime ago when she was more naïve and he was more jaded.  - _Why are they holding hands? -Because they are together._

“We are together,” she says simply.

“In this way,” he finishes, as an anxiety-laden weight he is previously unaware of lifts off him.

She laughs, a teasing twinkle in her eye as she leans in closer, “so you will sleep with me?”

 

\-------------

 

After, she curls into him, one hand on his chest above where his heart is, as his hands idly trace patterns across her back. Real life has a distinct advantage to her daydreams, she muses, in all her scenarios where Steve returns to her, she had never considered the _after_.

(They are in dark dreary dangerous Gotham, and the sheets are 800 thread count Egyptian cotton, but she is reminded of a snowy night in a Belgium town, of rough spun woollen sheets coarse against her skin, of his heartbeat strong and sure against her cheek, of a haven that distracted from the impending end of the world.

She thinks, implausibly, of a _home_.)

His voice interrupts her thoughts, “you know, I wasn’t even sure if something made of clay could die, but I figured it’s been a hundred years and well…”

She smiles wryly, turns to meet his eyes in a rustle of expensive cotton, “turns out I came about in the more traditional sense – Zeus did bring me to life, but not in the way I was led to believe.”

“Huh. So we’re talking,” he pauses dramatically, memories of her words on a boat in the Atlantic plucking at him, “pleasures of the flesh and reproductive biology? That’s…neat.” He wants to continue to tease her – _so no relation to that antique on the fireplace mantle out there then_ – but her expression turns contemplative.

“I was angry at my mother for a long time, for hiding the truth from me. It… took me a while to realise she had her reasons,” her face burrows into his chest, as his arms instinctively tighten around her. Her voice, when she speaks again, is muffled, soft, wistful, “someday I might be able to ask her.”

He loses her to her thoughts of her mother and Themyscira, and not for the first time, feels a measure of guilt for stealing her away.

( _He told her that once, the first night in London, when she looked both the fierce warrior and a homesick young woman under the wan lighting of the inn._

 _She simply looked at him then, eyes serious, “I came because it is my destiny and my duty, Steve Trevor. Besides, who would I be if I’d stayed?” Her stance is regal and proud, every inch a warrior princess ready for battle, but even as she speaks he tries not to notice the tears welling in her eyes or that those were also the last words she spoke to her mother, carried to his ears by the wind._ )

Pressing a kiss to her forehead, he shifts to bring his body in further contact with hers, front to front, tangling their legs together, revelling in the close contact he never thought he would feel again,

He stabs at cheering her up, “An immortal demi-goddess, and a– I’m not even sure what, am I still human? I’m dating the daughter of the god of lightning… please never bring me to meet your father.”

She laughs, and the somber mood is broken.

 

\-------------

 

_“Am I still human?”_

His words, though carelessly spoken, ring a warning in her ears long after he falls asleep, and as she slowly succumbs to Hypnos’ spell. That night, for the first time since the Balkans, she dreams of her family:

She’s back in the City of Angels, except this isn’t 1993. There is a familiar, impossibly beautiful redhead in a summery dress standing in front of her, not looking even the slightest bit out of place with a flower crown perched on her head.

“Persephone.”

This time, her sister doesn’t talk, her finger crooks and Diana finds her legs following, like a well-trained puppy on a leash.

They stop at a small office tucked between an ice-cream shop and a Starbucks, Aides & Associates Tax Services, the sign proclaims, and cheerily below it, all your needs for the other certainty in life!

Her uncle is a studied stereotype of his chosen earthly profession, lounging in an overstuffed leather chair behind a dark oak desk, all slicked-back hair and black three-piece suit and pressed pocket-square and aviator shades, which he whips off with a flourish when she enters.

 _My niece._ The black of his eyes contrast sharply with his pale skin, and her urge to shiver has nothing to do from the air-conditioner-induced chill in the office. _It’s good to meet you. I missed you the last time you were here, it was tax season and we were swamped_. Her uncle maintains his poker face throughout, and so Diana isn’t sure if he is joking.

_We heard about your Captain. As a token of gratitude for your help with my bloodthirsty nephew, the Katachthonios prevailed upon your father my brother to intercede with the Moiroi._

_We are not expecting your Captain for a good long while._

“I don’t understand.”

_Observe._

The plane shifts and she finds herself in a well-lit cave. She’s not alone, for there are three women in front of her surrounded by spools of thread in multitudes of colours. The leftmost mutters darkly to herself (Diana hears some curses directed at her uncle in ancient Greek, not entirely undeserved), hunched uncomfortably low over a spindle holding a piece of golden thread, frayed at both ends.

She watches in fascination as the ends mend and the centre Fate measures the short strand against an impossibly long tape, shaking her grey head.

She watches as it is passed to the third sister, who ignores the proffered thread and continues sifting through the tangle in front of her, before emerging with a dark thread, shot through with silver ( _hers_ , she realises with a jolt).

She watches as the golden line is twined around hers into a swirl of silver-black and shining golden, winking in the torchlight and stretching as far as she can trail it into the darkness…

She finds herself back in the office, seat leather cool against her back, cool air against her right arm, the sound of Persephone fiddling with the Nespresso machine in the corner and the impassive eyes of her uncle on her.

_Do you understand now, Diana Princess of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta Queen of the Amazons and Zeus God of the sky?_

She thinks she does: deus ex machina.

As she turns to leave, he stops her with a _wait_ and a wink, _your cousin Thanatos sends his regards._

 

\-------------

 

She wakes up to the smell of coffee and fresh pancakes and a cool, empty space beside her in the bed, and snaps to wakefulness at a speed Antiope of the gruelling, unforgiving pre-dawn drills would have been proud of.

“Morning, Angel.” (It’s funny how the mind can forget certain things, like how she forgets his epithet for her _because when I opened my eyes you were there, sunlight framing your face, looking so beautiful I thought I made it to Heaven and you were my guardian angel._ )

Her heart slows down from its frenetic double-time because _it wasn’t a dream_ he is real and alive and gazing at her from his position at the doorway. “Morning.”

“I made a promise once, many years ago,” he starts, “to the most amazing person I’ve known – she’s compassionate and beautiful and driven and-“

She chucks a pillow at him which he neatly sidesteps, “flatterer.”

"Hey let me finish! See, the thing is, I promised I'd show her what we humans do when there are no wars to fight but I went and got myself killed and she had to figure that out for herself over the next century…”

Her voice suddenly catches in her throat "I didn't."

He smiles, bittersweet, "this lady once told me a promise is unbreakable. I intend to make good on mine."

A quick disappearing act out the door, and when he returns he's carrying a breakfast tray of coffee and pancakes and the paper

“When there are no wars, we have breakfast," he says, walking slowly to her, as her stomach rumbles in agreement, "we read the papers, we go to work…” he trails off, and the unspoken _we get married, make some babies, grow old together_ that he cuts off on dances in the air around them tantalisingly, wisps of a future that have yet to coalesce.

“What’s it like?” she whispers, a repetition of the question to which the answer Diana of swaying _awfully close_ with her champion in a magical snowfall lost in time never received.

Then, there was a wistfulness in his voice, an incredulity of an _after_ ; this time, there’s decisiveness and hope in his tone that isn’t just reserved for breakfast and papers and work when he says, “no idea, but let’s find out.”

 

\-------------

 

These are among the things they learn about each other:

 

He returns to Paris with her (Waller barely bats an eye, “so long as you are not neglecting your duties, Major”) and takes to it like a fish to water. She finds that he speaks perfect French, if a little anachronistic, “I was a spy once, after all.”

(Of course, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, _awshucks_ American speaking fluent French? He’s like catnip for her colleagues and snobby neighbours and _even_ her usually-implacable apartment doorman. She’s now the museum staff’s favourite gossip topic: the previously aloof and reserved Madame Prince who has a new beau and now whose smiles light up the room.)

 

 

She takes his watch out of her drawer and wears on her wrist home one day, and he breathes a surprised “you have it, after all this time?”

What she doesn’t tell, hasn’t told, eventually will tell, him is this: her office is a carefully curated museum in and of itself, artefacts as proxies of _home –_ items she procrastinates on cataloguing, like the terracotta figure whose twin stands in the throne room in Themyscira or that leather laminar armour so carefully preserved it reminds her of her Amazonian sisters and their training sessions; of mementos of her time spent amongst men like the pipe Sameer buys her one day when she wondered and over which he got a sound scolding from Etta, or the yellowed yet pristine women’s suffrage pamphlet she helped Etta distribute on the chilly streets of London, or the first edition _A Princess of Mars_ Chief gifts to her in 1931 five months before that fateful German presidential election. Tangible memories which she keeps in boxes behind glass and wood to the boxes in her mind.

His watch was there too, ticking through the solid oak drawer in quickstep to her heartbeat, a reliable, poignant reminder of love lost and belief and the good of man and above all, time slipping away _I wish we had more time._

But Steve, living, breathing, Steve is now in front of her, and that is one less thing she needs to curate.

 

 

He learns not to joke where ice-cream is concerned, because she takes it _very seriously_ – he once says, flippantly, in jest, "maybe I should quit ARGUS and open an ice cream store instead" as she indulges in a huge double-scoop pistachio-sea salt caramel abomination, and his remark is met with way too much enthusiasm to be associated with the chilled confectionary.

In Paris, devoted home to artisanal ice cream, she has become somewhat of discerning connoisseur. But even a connoisseur has their guilty pleasures: he watches in bemusement as she opens the freezer and furrows her brow and before he knows it there’s a sonic boom, a rush of wind that ruffles the paperwork, and she’s back with a Ben & Jerry’s cooler bag.

 

 

They both have nightmares (him more often than her) for wars never truly end for soldiers. His are not different from his military days: they are still set to the rat-tat-tat of strafing runs, but now he can name the villages which only exist as footnotes in history and cities in rubble which remain to be reassembled.  They remain of muddy French trenches and dry Gulf sands, stained red with blood and littered with broken bodies; of crackly voices over the radio and searing heat of flames licking briefly at him before everything goes numb.

She dreams of darkness and futility, of loss and failure, of powerlessness where her sword breaks and her shield shatters and her lasso snaps; and when the innocent phantoms in her terrors fall they wear the faces of all she loves, contorted with pain and accusation. Then there is the one where she wakes up yelling, tangled in bedlinens which feel too much like steel tanker treads wrapping and tightening across her torso, ears ringing with the distant plane whine, an afterimage of a supernova in the sky burning her retinas.

The first night it happens she wakes to him, curled in against himself, shuddering a muttered _no no no_. His body is tense and covered with a cold film of sweat as she gathers him into her arms and throws a leg carelessly over his. She murmurs into his ear, her hands brushing through his hair, and rubbing circles in his back, as the tension seeps slowly out of him and he relaxes into slumber. He returns the favour a month later, when her tossing wakes him up and he witnesses as her eyes snap open and a pained _Steve_ issues from her lips. He hugs her tight against him as her hands smooth over his face, eyes glassy under a sheen of tears.

(“Promise you wouldn’t leave me,” she whispers.

“Not if you wouldn’t.”

A watery smile, “deal.”

The unspoken, made on the grimy streets of London: _a deal is a promise is unbreakable._ )

 

 

She strongly dislikes the word, “captain” as he finds out one day when he calls her _angel_ and she wonders on her nickname for him and he innocently suggests “what about ‘my captain’?” only to feel her still in his arms as a shadow passes over her expression.

(He learns later she associates ‘captain’ with death, a consequence first brought upon by a fiery explosion of mustard gas and American spy in the sky, then reinforced by wars as captains unnumbered, unnamed, fall around her, then of a Doomsday heralding the death of one of their own where she recalls the voice of her aunt _America is a bad place for gods… for demi-gods too_ and where in the somber aftermath Bruce Wayne the billionaire takes the podium at the state funeral with a posthumous thanks for Superman on behalf of the city and gives a heartfelt reading of O Captain My Captain that she is reminded of said American spy all over again: _but I, with mournful tread._ )

 

\-------------

 

A century and two lifetimes on, he still looks at her in awe – he is Icarus, dazzled by the light of her sun, daring to fly too close on waxed wings because he believes she pull him out of the water in every iteration (she already did, once).

The first time she notices one of his awed looks she blushes and asks him why. He simply says, “because you are you,” as though that is reason enough. (It is, to him.)

 

\-------------

 

Two months in, she comes back to an apartment strewn with roses and dinner in the air and a nervous Steve Trevor.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be into this,” he rambles, running a hand through his carefully-combed hair that tufts start sticking out, “I’m still not. But I thought it’s been two months and it’s about the anniversary of the day we met so I wanted to do something special but it’s ok if you’re not into this.”

She smiles, because while there’s a booking at _Saturne_ under her name and Bruce’s private jet is at the airfield prepped for a weekend getaway to Sardinia, there’s something about _this_ that feels like home and them all at once.

And so she says, because it is the first thing that occurs to her, because she means it, because she is more than a century overdue, “I love you.”

 

\-------------

 

They stand, panting (sans Barry) and covered in blood and alien goo and sweat, in the aftermath of yet another in a seemingly-unending series of skirmishes, surrounded by Parademon carcasses. She wipes her sword off on the armour of the body beside her, and picks her way through them, half surveying the damage, half dreaming about going back to Paris and a warm bath and Steve and supper (not necessarily in that order).

Distracted as she is, she doesn’t notice that Bruce has moved to walk beside her until he says, “you’re happy,” in an intone not unlike how he might say “there are enemies coming” or “stealing is not polite”.

“Yes,” she says simply. Then corrects, “ _happier_.” Because she’s still the same Diana that spent the last Steve-less century exploring and learning humanity and finding pockets of joy and contentment – in the taste of ice-cream and the laughter of children and the bend of sunlight as it cuts through the Louvre’s pyramid and each hard-fought day of peacetime and her surrogate family that is the League. Steve brings an extra dimension to her life and she is glad for it, for him.

 

\-------------

 

A moment:

“I don’t deserve you,” he tells her. His hair is flopping into his eyes, bright blue and earnest, his face is open, and he looks achingly young.

She laughs, fingers dancing over his jaw, “a long time ago, someone told me it’s not about what you deserve – it’s what you believe.”

His mouth lifts into a half-smile.

“I believe in us, Steve Trevor.”

 

 

She has battles on the horizon, and a war to fight, but now she also has time.

 

 

_Fin._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Turns out I couldn't decide which method I liked so I wrote them half out until the right one rather whacked me over the head. I quite like the others so they stayed and became part of Diana's what-ifs. In my canon, the first half of scenarios ii and iii happened, in that she does find shades of her family in LA, and Bruce does collect all available information on everyone (see: Tower of Babel).


End file.
